Pod Insights The Daily Stoic | Wondery+ Do This. It's Enough. | 7 Stoic Habits To Make You Wiser About this episode Marcus Aurelius didn't just study philosophy when he was young. To him, philosophy was a lifelong study, a process that he committed to.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:05 Ryan Holiday? Welcome to the Daily Stoic Podcast, where each day we bring you a Stoic-inspired meditation, designed to help you find strength and insight and wisdom into everyday life. Each one of these episodes is based on the 2,000-year-old philosophy that has guided some of history's greatest men and women, help you learn from them, to follow in their example, and to start your day off with a little dose of courage and discipline and justice and wisdom. For more, visit DailyStoic.com.
0:56 Ryan Holiday? Do this, it's enough. Marcus Aurelius didn't just study philosophy when he was young. He didn't just pick a set of beliefs and stick with them. No, to him, philosophy was a lifelong study, a process that he committed to. That's why even as an old man, he was seen famously headed off to attend the lectures from Sextus the philosopher. And while this certainly made him quite educated and quite smart, we can also imagine something else happening after so many years of reading and discoursing and meditating. What undoubtedly happened is that as he got older, the more he learned, the closer he came to understanding Socrates's humility, the sense that the more one learns, the less certain they are, they know. As John Adams, detailed in David McCullough's amazing biography, wrote in his own old age,
1:41 Ryan Holiday? "You are not singular in your suspicions that you know but little. The longer I live," he said, "the more I read, the more patiently I think, and the more anxiously I inquire, the less I seem to know." Yet Adams, like Marcus, still found himself returning to a set of ageless, universal principles. They found themselves boiling things down to their essence into real and practical epithets for the self, as Marcus called them. Adams himself came up with just three commands, which he passed on down to his granddaughter Caroline. "Do justly, love mercy, walk humbly." "This is enough," he said. "My task is to be good," Marcus Aurelius wrote. "The more you learn, the longer you live, the more you will understand that that is your job too."
2:26 Ryan Holiday? And doing that is more than enough.
2:40 Ryan Holiday? Believing that you're smart can make you really stupid. More than 2,000 years ago, Epictetus reminded his students that it was impossible to learn that which you think you already know. So for the last six years, I've been working, thinking, and writing on this book about wisdom. Wisdom is many things, but one thing it is not is something that you are born with. No, it is born out of having the right habits. It is born from doing the right work. And that's what we're going to talk about in today's episode. Some daily habits that can make you not wise, but certainly wiser.
3:22 Ryan Holiday? You have to ask questions. There's a famous story about the physicist Isidore Rabi. When he would get home from school every day, his mother wouldn't ask if he got good grades, how he did on a test, if he had any homework. Her first question wasn't even, did he have fun? Or how was he feeling? Or what happened at school? Her first question was, did you ask a good question today? And maybe this doesn't seem like much, but it actually is everything because questions are what drive discovery. Questions are how we learn. Think about Socrates, right? The Socratic method isn't Socrates walking around Athens, telling people things.
4:04 Ryan Holiday? The Socratic method is about the asking of questions. And look, not every question has to be probing or incisive. It can be simple, like, what do you mean? How does that work? Or it can be something like, I'm sorry, I don't understand. Can you explain that again? Can you explain that another way? It's only through questions that we get the information that we need. And this drive to ask, to question, that was instilled in him by his mother. It turned him into one of the greatest physicists of his time and earned him a Nobel nomination from Albert Einstein and a Nobel Prize in 1990. Forty-four, and his work led to the invention of the MRI.
4:45 Ryan Holiday? Questions are the key, not just to knowledge, but to success, to discovery and mastery. They're how we learn and how we get better. And I think most people are born full of questions. We want to know the names of things. We want to know how things work. Most of all, we want to know why. But then this habit is crushed. Too many of us lose this impulse. Isidora said that physicists are the Peter Pans of the human race. They never grow up. They keep their curiosity, and that is key. If you want to be smarter, you have to keep asking questions and you have to make this a daily practice. We must preserve that part of us that dares to inquire because asking leads to answers and answers lead to more questions. And from not knowing, we get to knowing and we get to truth.
5:30 Ryan Holiday? And then we get to new unknowns that we have to ask questions about. There's no such thing as a dumb question. You know, you hear that in school, but it's true. In fact, people only become smart by asking questions, even so-called dumb questions. So if you want to be wiser, start asking questions.
5:53 Ryan Holiday? Create a second brain. It began when Joan Didion's mother gave her a small notebook, hoping to keep her precocious five-year-old busy. And she would still be filling up those notebooks 82 years later, including many at this very table that I am sitting at. Joan Didion used notebooks as a reporter and as a novelist. She turned to her notebooks when she was reeling from grief, when she was processing sessions with her therapist. She used them on her travels. She filled literally too many to count over the course of her life. And she relied on these notebooks, as well as index cards, to record observations and insights that would help her produce something like five novels, a dozen nonfiction books,
6:34 Ryan Holiday? screenplays like A Star is Born, and countless articles for some of the best papers and magazines in the world. Like it is for almost every creative. These notebooks were the raw material that fueled her art. A second brain, as it's called. And for hundreds of years, smart people have kept what's Called a commonplace book. I keep one myself. I do all my reading in physical books and I transfer them to note cards and I organize these note cards by theme and they're what I draw on when I'm writing articles, when I'm writing books and when I'm making these videos. You should never read Pliny the Elder advised around the time of Seneca without taking extracts. As a young man, future General James Mattis hitchhikes to listen to a talk by the philosopher Eric
7:17 Ryan Holiday? Hoffer and afterwards Hoffer gives Mattis a piece of advice that changes his life. He says, "Make sure you write down everything you find." And he would start to accumulate a series of three-ring binders that he would call his books of wisdom and he draws on these when he's creating battle plans and weighing difficult decisions or he's writing speeches or drafting orders. These collections of anecdotes, quotes, ideas, stories, these are what you need to be a successful person in the world. This is how you get smarter. You can't just rely on your memory. You can't just take this stuff and throw it in a black hole. You have to record it. You have to organize it. You have to review it. Whether that's an epiphany we had on a hike or a piece
8:01 Ryan Holiday? of advice we got from our grandmother before she passed, the mistake we made that we never want to make again, the progress we're making on something. A beautiful passage of a novel we read on vacation. You gotta write it down. You gotta capture it before it passes. Every event, every exchange, every moment that's important enough to record is an insight into who we are in that instant too. And we'll never be that thing again. We might never hear that idea again. And by taking note, we are preserving ourselves for our future selves and making ourselves smarter in the process and perhaps hopefully future generations as well.
8:41 Ryan Holiday? There are a lot of great talkers in this world, but there are not a lot of great. Listeners, Zeno, the founder of Stoicism, has two students, Aristote and Cleanthes. Aristote is a great talker. He's a smart guy. He does ask questions, which is awesome, but he mostly likes to hear himself talk. Cleanthes, on the other hand, sits and listens, and it's Cleanthes ultimately that Zeno leads the school to. He would famously say and remind all of his students that we have two ears and one mouth for a reason. When we open our mouth, we are shutting our ears. And when we shut our ears, we miss out on things we could have learned. Someone else's perspective, someone else's experiences, someone else's
9:23 Ryan Holiday? advice. We close the door, we shut ourselves off from wisdom. There's a story in the wisdom book about Maya Angelou. As a kid, she was a giant ear which could just absorb all sound. You know, her childhood was scary and dark, but the solace was the time she spent in her room, inhaling poetry, listening to the voices in her house, out on the street, on the radio. She said she would listen to accents, that she just fell in love with the way human beings sound. She says, "There's no human voice that was unbeautiful to me." And her ability to really lock into how people talk and what they were saying and what they meant and how it came together, this is what shaped and informed her as a novelist. We shouldn't try to be a giant mouth. We should try to be like Maya Angelou,
10:08 Ryan Holiday? a giant ear. We should talk less and listen more. Because what we hear could change everything, and certainly it will change you. If you want to be smarter, listen more, talk less.
10:24 Ryan Holiday? Lou Gehrig was not a natural athlete. He makes himself one in the gym, and he wasn't a natural baseball player either. He made himself one, and he became great the way we will become great, which is by making mistakes. He famously lets a ball go through his legs during a tryout for the New York Giants in 1921. Cost him a spot on the team. In 1931, he passes a runner while rounding the bases, and he gets called out. And it cost him not just a home run, but the home run title. In between, as well as before and after, he made a lot of mistakes, errors, as well. They're called in baseball and he's credited with 196 in his career stats. Of course, some are more painful than others. Like, it's not fun to be sent down to the minors as he was in 1923.
11:08 Ryan Holiday? He said it took the heart out of him, but it actually didn't, right? He understands that in the minors, he's going to get more playing time. He's going to have more room to make mistakes. He's going to learn and grow as a player. When he came here, his manager at the Yankees would later say, Lou Gehrig was one of the dumbest players he'd ever seen. But he said Lou Gehrig had a virtue that not many athletes do, which is that he didn't make the same mistake twice. He said Lou Gehrig makes all the mistakes, but not twice. And that's what experience is. That's what getting our reps is about. Making the mistakes on the stage, on the field, in the heat of battle, on the page, in the market. You gotta make mistakes to learn the lessons. And the more mistakes you make, the more you can learn. The problem is if you keep making the same mistake over and over again
11:53 Ryan Holiday? and fail to learn the lesson. There was a famous expression often attributed to Cato in Roman times, which is that a fool is not someone who makes a mistake. A fool is someone who stubs their foot on the same rock twice. So the ability to learn lessons from our mistakes, that's what wisdom is. Of course, wisdom is not the mistake itself. It is the lack of wisdom causes the mistake. But does wisdom come out of the other side? And if you're putting yourself out there, if you have the courage to try, if you are getting outside your comfort zone, if you are doing the thing in front of the audience with real stakes, then you make the mistakes and you get better and you learn. But the problem is that shame and ego and stubbornness impede this process. We deny the error. We blame the error on someone.
12:38 Ryan Holiday? We continue in error. In Meditations, Marcus Verdi is writing as the most powerful man in the world, but he reminds himself that if someone can show me where I'm making a mistake or looking at things from the wrong perspective, I'll gladly change because it's the truth that I'm after. And he said, "The truth never harms anyone." He says, "What harms us is to persist in self deceit or ignorance." The mistake is not the problem. Making the mistake again and again because you refuse to learn the lesson of the mistake, that's the problem. That's the difference between a wise person and a fool. It don't have to be perfect. You just have to make mistakes and learn from them.
13:19 Ryan Holiday? It was Huxley who said that the fact that human beings don't learn from history is one of the most important lessons that history can teach us. I don't know why we choose to learn from experience, from making mistakes, when we don't have to. Why wouldn't we want to learn from the mistakes of others? And that's what history is about. Seneca says, and this is actually the quote that serves as the epigraph to The Daily Stoic. Seneca says that "through the study of history and philosophy, we annex all the lives of the past into our own." The amount of time people spend watching the news, scanning social media for the latest hot takes, chasing trends, focusing on what's happening right now, is not just a waste of time.
14:01 Ryan Holiday? It comes at the expense of studying things historically, annexing the past into your own life in a way that would allow you to actually understand and make use of the information you're getting about what's happening right now. You don't have to like what happened in the past to learn from it, but you do have to engage with it and you do have to make time to study it. History should make up the majority of our information diet. Too many people are watching and reading too much news and they're not reading enough books. Specifically, they are not reading old books. We should understand that the Greek word for history, it means inquiry, it means investigation. Don't just read some random popular history book. Go down the rabbit hole, explore things,
14:44 Ryan Holiday? swarm a certain period of history, a certain historical event. Go through it piece by piece, book by book. Learn what it was like back then. Inhabit the world, see the world from that perspective. History is not just a way of understanding then, it's a way of understanding now. It is a lens for understanding the present moment, is a way of predicting, even determining, the future. So if you want to be wiser and better, make sure that you are studying history.
15:17 Ryan Holiday? You gotta clean up your information diet. Let me tell you a story about someone who's on their phone from the minute they wake up. Someone with multiple TVs in their bedroom who watches Fox and Friends every morning, and then the Fox shows at night, too. They're skimming the headlines of every newspaper. They spend hours on Twitter and social media. Their phone is filled with articles that people text them. They're watching YouTube clips and news clips and hot takes. People are calling with gossip. Imagine this is a rich and famous person, too. Imagine they have an assistant that travels with them with a portable printer, no less, that prints out positive articles about them that they can hand at a moment's notice
15:59 Ryan Holiday? whenever that person's spirits seem to be dipping. I mean, you would say, this is a recipe for insanity. What's wrong with this person? And what if I told you this person was the President of the United States? You'd probably say what Kennedy's doctor said when he heard that the President was taking these crazy pain medications and various other drugs. He said, "No one with their finger on the button should be consuming anything like that." And yet, Trump's media diet is not just crazy. It's not that dissimilar to a lot of other people who become information junkies, who consume endless amounts of real-time information, endless amounts of punditry
16:40 Ryan Holiday? and speculation, who consume breaking news as if they were gonna do anything with this information. And what they end up doing is breaking their brains, as they say in "Tag garbage in, garbage out." It's also true in your diet. If you consume nothing but endless amounts of empty calories, you will become morbidly obese. If you consume garbage information, if you consume too much information, you will swell up and you will lose your mind and your mental health. It takes a lot of discipline to manage your information diet, especially in this world, to be a discerning and selective conduit for everything that's coming at you. Schopenhauer said that the art
17:25 Ryan Holiday? Of not reading is also an important one, right? It's not how much you know, it's that you know the right things. It's not that you read, Epictetus said, it's what you read. Don't want to know everything, as Democritus says, because in the process, we can become ignorant of everything. We have to cultivate in this day and age, quality over quantity. We have to find experts we can trust. We have to verify what these people tell us. You should not be consuming hours and hours of podcasts each week. You should not be drinking directly from the fire hose. You have to let things settle down. You have to get perspective. You have to go to things that are likely to have staying power. We have to be able to make connections between things that are happening now and things that have happened before.
18:10 Ryan Holiday? We have to get information that challenges us, that makes us uncomfortable. We do have to be able to hear what the other side has to say. And we have to know what's trivia and what's superficial. We have to not be distracted by trifles and we can't ignore what is essential. We have to be wary of information overload. We have to avoid the tendency to doom scroll. We should never, ever mistake gathering information and opinions for doing something about a problem.
18:42 Ryan Holiday? And look, the final thing that you have to do, however smart you are, however accomplished you are, however wise you think you are, you have to stay astute. There's a story about Mark's riffs. He's seen leaving the palace in Rome one day. He's an old man and his friend asks him where he's going. And he says, I'm off to see Sextus the philosopher to learn that which I don't yet know. The friend's amazed. He goes, here we have the most powerful, wisest man in the world, taking up his tablets and still going to school. I think that's amazing. That's exactly it. Wisdom takes work and it is the work of a lifetime. You don't just ask questions when you're young. You don't just read a bunch of history while you're in college. These are things you have to keep doing. You have to do always.
19:27 Ryan Holiday? If you think you've graduated, if you think you've learned everything there is to learn, in a sense, you're right, because It becomes impossible for you to learn anything else. So the most foundational daily habit, the way you can continue to become wiser, is to focus on what you don't know and to go after resolving that problem, to continue learning, to remain ever a student. I love that Marcus Truist was going to see the philosopher, not even bringing the philosopher to him. So if we want to learn, if we want to become wiser, we have to remain students, not just when we're young, not just when we have time, but always and forever. Wisdom takes work, and it's work we have to keep doing. So keep doing that work today and always.
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